MAINSTREAM JOURNALISM AS ANTI-VERNACULAR MODERNISM

Abstract

The on-going collapse of mainstream American journalism has occasioned attempts to salvage it, with the explanation that democracy is at risk when “serious”, “socially responsible” journalism is absent. This paper, taking Daniel Hallin's cue, argues that mainstream journalism's dramatic rise and fall, largely a post-war phenomenon, can be significantly explained as an instance of cultural modernism. Drawing on concepts from modernist architecture, the paper shows how journalism's high-modernist aspirations pitted it against the persistent, vernacular journalism of tabloid news, involving features of design, discourse and practice, and why they can be understood, not as a successfully achieved scientific journalism, but as the passing modernist moment in the continuing contestation about the nature of news and news reporting.

Keywords:

• American mainstream journalism
• modernism
• modernist architecture
• tabloid
• vernacular

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from discussion of a previous version by the members of the Vernacular Modernisms/Modernist Vernaculars seminar at the Modernist Studies Association meetings in November 2009. I am also grateful to my colleagues Karen Koehler, Mark Feinstein and Michele Hardesty for sharing their respective knowledge of architecture, socio-linguistics and American literature, which included visiting my seminar on Journalism and Modernism, where Daniel Hallin also generously lectured. Thanks as well to the Canadian Center for Architecture for allowing me access to their excellent library collection on modernist design.

Notes

1. For an enthusiastic and historical discussion by a practitioner of an earlier wave of new journalism, see Tom Wolfe's essay (1973). Robert Boynton (2005) reviews a more recent version, which he says synthesizes muckraking with the 1960s-style, creating a “reportorially based, narrative-driven long form nonfiction”. Barbara Lounsberry, who carefully defines the features of “literary or artistic nonfiction” (1990, p. xiii), argues that “the second half of the twentieth century has been an age of nonfiction” marked by experiments in ‘“fact writing’” (1990, p. xi). During the period between these publications, David Altheide and Robert Snow were among the first to observe that “organized journalism is dead” (1991, p. x.), while John Langer (1998) offered the rare non-normative acknowledgement of the historical persistence of “other news”, that is, tabloid journalism.

2. In a paradoxical twist on this understanding of making journalism scientific by safeguarding its practice in the hands of trained practitioners, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, according to New York Times editor Bill Keller, “has claimed credit on several occasions for creating something he calls ‘scientific journalism’, meaning that readers are given the raw material to judge for themselves whether the journalistic write-ups are trustworthy” (Keller, 2011).

3. The Declaration of Universal Principles of Journalism Education, as adopted by the World Journalism Education Council in 2007, includes the principle that “Journalism is a global endeavor; journalism students should learn that despite political and cultural differences, they share important values and professional goals with peers in other nations” (http://wjec.ou.edu/principles.html).

4. Media barons of this time had strong personal associations with modernist design. William Paley, who led CBS for more than 50 years, owned a formidable collection of modern art valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, which he donated to New York's Museum of Modern Art, where, from its founding, he was a trustee, later becoming MoMA president and chair and, until his death, chair emeritus. Henry Luce shared this “machine-age aesthetic”. Alan Brinkley (2010, pp. 155–8, 179) catalogues Fortune magazine's numerous articles and photographs about and by modernist designers, often the direct result of the publisher's intervention. Luce considered publishing his own architectural magazine, Skyline, but settled for purchasing Architectural Forum, which he published for 40 years. Witold Rybczinski (2006) called it the best on the subject during the 1960s, “the glory days of modernism”. In 1936, Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce commissioned the modernist architect Edward Durell Stone to build a cluster of buildings, including a main house, “all furnished in austere but elegant International Style”, at their South Carolina estate (Brinkley, 2010, p. 207).

5. Kajir Jain makes two relevant points about vernacular forms. She says that they can be “modern but not modernist” (Jain, 2007, p. 14) and that their relationship to modernist or high-culture phenomena is not fixed. A porous relationship, dynamic in its exchanges, typifies lived vernaculars in relation to the non-vernacular (Jain, 2007, p. 37). Though for analytical purposes here, they are treated as distinct.

6. S. Elizabeth Bird's work is a sympathetic, close anthropological analysis of the content and reception of tabloids in the present era (see Bird, 1992, 1998, 2003). Like Helen MacGill Hughes, she is uninterested in making moral judgments about vernacular news.

7. Park's observations applied to more than newspapers. Finding the proper voice to present the news on radio—how the text should be written, how the news reader should speak—was a practical problem. Many early broadcast journalists were former wire service or newspaper reporters, and drew on print traditions. One, Edward R. Murrow of CBS, lacked that experience. Mythologized as the very embodiment of responsible radio reporting during its formative years, he took a surprising position on this matter, rejecting modernist formality in favor of something close to the tabloid voice. In 1937, immediately after Murrow's arrival in London, the BBC's founding director-general John Reith remarked to him that “‘in view of your record, I daresay your company's programs in the future will be a little more intellectual’. ‘On the contrary’, Murrow disagreed, ‘I want our programs … to be down to earth, in the vernacular of the man on the street’” (Finkelstein, 1997, p. 55). R. Franklin Smith (1978, p. 8) adds this exchange: “‘Then you will drag radio down to the level of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.’ ‘Exactly, and literally’”.

8. Park claimed in a letter that he himself had been “one of the first and humbler of the muckrakers” (Rausenbush, 1979, p. 158).

9. Linguistics provides a similar comparison between high and low varieties of speech, and the tensions between them, using the terms diglossia and register (see Miller, 2009).